Handwritten character recognition using some (anti)-diagonal structural features

Abstract. In this paper, we present a methodology for off-line handwritten character recognition. The proposed methodology relies on a new feature extraction technique based on structural characteristics, histograms and profiles. As novelty, we propose the extraction of new eight histograms and four profiles from the 32×32 matrices that represent the characters, creating 256-dimension feature vectors. These feature vectors are then employed in a classification step that uses a k-means algorithm. We performed experiments using the NIST database to evaluate our proposal. Namely, the recognition system was trained using 1000 samples and 64 classes for each symbol and was tested on 500 samples for each symbol. We obtain promising accuracy results that vary from 81.74% to 93.75%, depending on the difficulty of the character category, showing better accuracy results than other methods from the state of the art also based on structural characteristics.